If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you'd like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That's because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best.

What's the most important single piece of information you know that would help people new to SEO?

Understand the Long Tail. Most search phrases are unique, so there is a LOT of traffic to be had from non-competitive phrases. Choose many keywords from your niche, and write a page on each. Watch your logs. If people arrive under a particular keyword term you've missed, add a page to your site using that keyword term. Repeat.

Sure fire way to get a lot of traffic that is largely immune from shifts in ranking.

What's the most important single piece of information you know that would help people new to SEO?

I am new also to seo, the important information that would help people new to seo is how the search engine indexed and rank the keywords. As seo you need to be more patience and resourceful in researching what is new in seo, the terminologies used, processes to follow, tips to research, guidelines and the most on how to be a successful seo.

What's the most important single piece of information you know that would help people new to SEO?

Yea I'd have to agree with you peter, so you think relevant links from like blog post or things to that nature which are relevant pages are better links then high pr links?

You know I'm starting to wonder how important pr is, I know that it makes pages appear more important to the search engines, and bring up numerous page in the search engine, it seems like the higher pr the best serps you'll have with content optimization, or it will pick up keywords up off the page.

Now it seems like contextual links, and using anchor text as keywords will shoot keywords up, I'm confused cause I only have a pr3 and I'm number 11 for a very competitive key term and all the sites around me have pr6-5.

The thing is about my page rank I have 3 pr7 links, and like 4 pr6 links which granted I know thats not a lot, and I have several other links, and 3,4 links, but my pr is still reading 3, I'm like .

I"m thinking maybe I should buy more high end links, but that get expensive.

I think page rank helps a lot on content, like bringing up pages in the serps that don't have much anchor text in the inboud links, kind of like wikipedia willl pull up tons of stuff for keywords because of the large pr that is passed thought the pages.